Jekyll Minimal Dark Orange is a lightweight, responsive Jekyll theme for personal blogs, distributed as a Ruby gem, that provides a dark orange design, built-in search, social sharing links, and video embedding. The theme is developed by son-link and is open source under the GNU/GPL-3.0 license.
What is Jekyll Minimal Dark Orange?
Jekyll Minimal Dark Orange is a themed starting point for Jekyll static sites. It takes your Jekyll posts and pages and renders them with a dark orange color scheme plus ready-to-use components: search, social share buttons, responsive video embeds, and optional Google Analytics. As a gem-based theme, it installs via a Gemfile and configures through _config.yml. The author uses it for his own Spanish-language blog.
Key Features
- Responsive layout — Uses MicroCSS.css, the author's lightweight CSS framework, to adapt pages to mobile and desktop sizes.
- Built-in search — Ships with a search.json Liquid template for Simple-Jekyll-Search, indexing post title, URL, category, tags, date, and description.
- Social sharing buttons — Adds post share links for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube, enabled via
social_links: true. - Responsive video iframes — Wrap YouTube or Vimeo embeds in a
divwith classvideoand remove width/height attributes to make them fluid. - Google Analytics — Set
google-analyticsin _config.yml with your tracking code to enable analytics. - jekyll-seo-tag support — Add the plugin to the plugins array to generate meta tags for search engines and social sharing.
- Custom navigation control — Hide any page from the menu by adding
onmenu: falsein its front matter. - Custom 404 page — Create a
404.mdor404.htmlwithlayout: 404andpermalink: /404.htmlto match the theme.
Who is it for?
Jekyll Minimal Dark Orange is for developers and bloggers who build Jekyll static sites and want a fast, pre-styled blog without extra JavaScript frameworks. It suits personal bloggers who need built-in search, GitHub Pages users who want a gem-based theme, and tech writers who embed videos regularly. Since the theme is open source under GPL-3.0, developers can fork and extend it.
Use cases
- Personal bloggers — Set up a blog with pagination, tags, categories, and instant search in minutes by adding the gem, configuring pagination, and creating a search.json file.
- Video tutorial creators — Embed YouTube and Vimeo videos responsively without writing custom CSS, just by wrapping iframes in a
.videodiv. - Open-source contributors — Modify the theme's social links, styling, or layout under the GPL-3.0 license, or repurpose it as a base for other Jekyll projects.
How does it work?
Install the gem via your Gemfile, set theme: jekyll-minimal-dark-orange in _config.yml, and rename index.md to index.html with layout: home. To enable search, create a search.json file using the provided Liquid template, which outputs post metadata for Simple-Jekyll-Search. Then run bundle install and the theme renders your posts with the dark orange design. Additional features like social links and Google Analytics are configured via YAML variables.
FAQ
Is Jekyll Minimal Dark Orange free?
Yes, it is open source and available under the GNU/GPL-3.0 license, so you can use, modify, and redistribute it freely with attribution.
Does it support Google Analytics?
Yes, add a line like google-analytics with your tracking code to _config.yml, and the theme will include the analytics snippet on every page.
How do I hide a page from the navigation?
Set onmenu: false in the YAML front matter of that page. The page is still accessible by URL but won't appear in the menu.
Can I use it with GitHub Pages?
Yes, it is a gem-based theme and works on GitHub Pages. The jekyll-paginator gem is not necessary if you use GitHub Pages, since GitHub Pages provides pagination natively.
How do I embed videos?
Wrap the YouTube or Vimeo iframe in a div with class video and remove the width and height attributes. The CSS makes the iframe responsive and maintain its aspect ratio.
